The recording begins with confusion over who’s actually speaking—Dave has stepped away to rescue yet another burned pot of porridge, leaving the conversation in the hands of Hat Guy. What follows is an increasingly unhelpful brainstorming session about Post-it notes. Dave has been scattering them across fields, hoping the mysterious “Dropbox guy” might deliver peanuts. Suggestions arise that maybe, instead of begging for legumes, they could use the notes to ask where they actually are. Caleb is promptly assigned to line up the stickies into a giant field-wide message.
From there, matters only worsen. The townsfolk proudly explain their method of bottling water in the well itself, forcing anyone thirsty to rappel forty feet down. A basket-and-rope system is dismissed outright as too complicated. The sheds of Bootstuck also come under discussion: there’s the “two by four” shed (literally two feet by four feet), the massive hangar-like shed, and, of course, the “shed shed”—a shed specifically designed to store other sheds, mostly to keep the squirrels out.
By the end of the tape, the documenteur audibly falters, questioning the point of it all. The patience that once carried him through tales of waving systems and porridge disasters is beginning to fray. Bootstuck, it seems, is not just an archive of absurdity—it’s a test of endurance.
www.bootstuck.com
Episode Transcript
What?
Sorry, hang on, you're cut.
Yep.
There you are.
Speaker 02 (00:20):
Hang on.
Speaker 00 (00:21):
Am I in here now?
Who am I telling is was thatDave?
Speaker 02 (00:24):
Yep, he's gone.
Dave's gone.
He's gotta go put on anotherpot of porridge because he
burned the last one.
Speaker 00 (00:30):
I see.
How did oh okay, so I'm talkingto Hack Guy.
All right.
Speaker 02 (00:34):
You're talking to me.
I'm talking to you.
Yep.
That's the way the conversationworks.
Speaker 00 (00:38):
Now, I wanted to talk to you about hang on, I'm
speaking.
Speaker 02 (00:42):
Smack smack.
Dave needs peanuts.
We got a little yellow post itnote.
You know about them?
There's like maybe a hundred orfifty or a hundred and fifty or
so like that.
Many, many, many more than ten.
And you got a sticky side andyou got a righty side.
But you can also write on theother side, because the sticky
side's only on the top.
Speaker 00 (01:02):
I'm familiar with that.
Speaker 02 (01:04):
Uh oh, okay.
Well then I shouldn't have toldyou all about it.
Well, what Dave does is hewrites on them and then he puts
them out in the field, hopingthe Dropbox guy will see them.
This one says, send morepeanuts, and this one says, I
don't mind window curtains orblinds.
I'm not sure what that one'sabout, but to send peanuts make
sense.
We don't have any.
Speaker 00 (01:24):
Have you ever thought to ask them to maybe
give you some information onwhere exactly you are?
Speaker 02 (01:29):
Well, yeah, how do you do that?
With a post note, we couldbuild a sign paper airplane,
make it tiny enough that you canthrow it high in the sky, join
the air show, whoops, whoops,get it up there, maybe they'll I
just know what do you think?
Speaker 00 (01:44):
Well, I don't if you can write a giant note that
says Dave needs peanuts, you canwrite a giant note that says,
hey, where are we?
Speaker 02 (01:52):
Oh, giant note, yeah.
We should use all the stickiesand lay them out, Caleb!
Speaker 01 (01:57):
We're gonna need you to lay out the stickies.
No, line them up.
Line them up.
Yeah, line them up.
And then just keep doing it,yeah.
Okay.
Speaker 02 (02:11):
Caleb's on it.
Good idea.
Speaker 00 (02:13):
Oh my god.
Speaker 02 (02:15):
We take suggestions, I guess.
Speaker 00 (02:18):
Not well.
Speaker 02 (02:19):
We decided what we were gonna do is we're gonna
bottle all the water in the welland then leave the bottles in
the well to stay cold, and thenif you need a bottle of water,
you just gotta repel 40 feet.
Speaker 00 (02:31):
You repel 40 feet?
Why don't you put the bottlesin a basket that you can then
hoist to the top?
Speaker 01 (02:38):
Line them up.
Line them up.
Speaker 02 (02:41):
Well, then you gotta put the basket, then someone's
gotta go all the way down andput the basket back there, and
then someone's gotta go all theway down and put a water in the
basket.
That's not gonna work.
Speaker 00 (02:53):
For you?
No, it won't.
You're right.
It won't.
Speaker 02 (02:56):
We might.
So they've got some of this oldschool rope cable like
sheathing, you see.
Ain't nothing really going oninside it.
Speaker 00 (03:05):
You mean a hose?
Speaker 02 (03:08):
Get that we have a thing, Dave found.
Oh.
Yeah.
He found it.
Don't worry about it.
There was a lot of clatterbecause Caleb had to go into the
this and that shed and find thething that Dave had.
Well, how big are these sheds?
Well, that one's a two by fourshed.
Yeah.
Made out of two by fours, twofeet by four feet.
(03:31):
Okay.
It's a smaller shed.
Yeah.
Speaker 00 (03:34):
It's got one door.
It sounded the size of anaircraft hangar.
Speaker 02 (03:40):
Well, that's the big shed.
That's our shed shed.
We gotta keep most of our shedswithin a shed because otherwise
the squirrels come around andthey try to go through the
cracks.
Speaker 00 (03:48):
You have a shed shed?
Speaker 02 (03:50):
No, pardon me.
Speaker 00 (03:51):
You have a shed shed?
Speaker 02 (03:52):
That's right.
Where do you keep your shed?
Speaker 01 (03:55):
I don't have a shed.
Speaker 02 (03:56):
That's alright.
We got one for you.
Which one would you We'll putone together for you if you come
up to see us and then you canstay there.
Speaker 00 (04:06):
What is that sound time hearing?
Speaker 02 (04:09):
That's none of your business.
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